Creativity, Compassion, and the Resilient Brain

A repost of a popular one from 2011.

As someone who has witnessed the amazing power of storytelling and other expressive modalities to support healing in many hundreds of people coping with the impact of childhood abuse, adult trauma, grief, severe mental illness, and depression, I'm interested in neuroplasticity, which is the term for the brain's ability to repair and rebuild itself throughout life.

(The graphic comes from http://www.knutsford-scibar.co.uk.)

Recently I listened to a series of web conferences on this topic sponsored by the The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine. http://www.nicabm.com.

On Wednesday, April 6, 2011, Dr. Dan Siegel, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who's well known for writing a number of books on the developing brain and the mindful brain, spoke about how early relationships shape the development of the brain, and how later experience can change it. (His web site: http://drdansiegel.com/.) I'm going to share with you a summary of the notes I took during the call, with my later reflections in italics. Basically, Dr. Siegel's talk scientifically affirmed everything I've experienced in egalitarian, non-clinical, expressive arts groups.

Dr. Siegel noted that the right brain is the seat of compassion, sense of context, oneness, refreshment, and it can be accessed through creativity, exercise, and meditation. It holds the consciousness of the Ground, context, symbolic meaning, interior life, and the ability to rejuvenate and heal. The left brain -- dominant in our culture -- connects to exterior life, strategic thinking, and literal meaning. A balance of both halves of the brain is necessary for optimal functioning. In some of its aspects, healing can be understood as a journey of patient and caregivers to strengthen right brain functioning:

1. Empathy -- connecting to the inner life of another person -- has been shown to improve every physical system in the body: immune, cardiovascular, and organ systems. The more interest a doctor expresses in the inner life of a patient, i.e., how that patient experiences their illness rather than symptomology, the more likely a positive outcome. According to Dr. Siegel, THE KEY TO OPTIMAL HEALING IS THE CONNECTING INNER LIFE TO INNER LIFE [my emphasis]. This means that doctors, teachers, therapists, parents, clergy must be in touch with their own inner lives. He called it practicing medicine, parenting, marrying, etc. from the inside out.

Storytelling is the most ancient and powerful way of reciprocal sharing inner life with another. Any of the non-verbal expressive media serve the same purpose. But we're narrative creatures, seeking meaning in our experience. This is the realm of story.

2. Scientists now accept health as wholeness, integration -- a natural drive, rather than conforming to an external standard of "fitness" or "normal," as it had previously. Neural integration means the linking of fragmented parts through brain fibers that connect different neurological parts and functions. In people who suffered early neglect or abuse, these integrative fibers have been damaged and the brain is not functioning as a harmonious system. Consequently, the body's systems are not functioning harmoniously and trauma or neglect often shows up somatically.

Story making, in its very nature, creates wholeness and integration. It holds conflict in the form of characters and situations in a larger container, and allows these conflicts to play out and resolve themselves naturally as a new story emerges. As storyteller of our lives, we are also the integrating consciousness.

3. The brain regulates the movement of energy throughout the nervous system and healthy, harmonious outer relationships strengthen this function. Chaotic, draining, turbulent relationships significantly impact neurological functioning.

The healing community that forms in story groups, or any other healing relationship based on a right-brain modality (not therapy necessarily, unless it has these qualities of creativity and inner life to inner life), be it authentic movement, expressive dance, free form visual arts, music making and listening, yoga, reiki, qigong (my spiritual practice), mindfulness meditation, equine therapy, shamanic chant, etc. becomes the container that holds a person and gives their brain an integrative environment, time, and space to heal itself and the integrative fibers to regrow.

4. Humiliation, shame, bullying are assaults on the whole system. What happens in the brain is that a natural drive for wholeness and expression slams on the brakes, and the victim is left with a sense of helplessness, anger, toxic release of cortisol -- the stress hormone. It kills synaptic connections in the brain. This manifests physically as nausea, a sense of being punched in the gut, avoidance of eye contact, heaviness in the chest. Inwardly it manifests as a sense of a defective self.

Storytelling and witness gives each person a sense of safety, belonging, and dignity, so necessary to thriving.

5. We are hard-wired to sense the intention of another -- especially if they have destructive or harmful intentions toward us. The stress hormone cortisol keeps us in a state of vigilance when our right brain senses danger in a relationship. But we are out of a state of integration and flow. Long-term emotional danger has enormous physical consequences.

Working with intuition, which is strengthened by the receptivity involved in creative process, makes us even more aware and responsive to toxicity in other people and situations. In these story groups, which are built on the sensory elements of time, environment, character, situation, and storyteller -- we become very attentive to where we are, what we're doing, and the often unconscious motivations and inner lives of others. For me at this point, story -- experiencing my life as an unfolding story with myself as the witness and storyteller -- is spiritual practice.

6. Mental illness, including depression and bipolar disorder, are apparently caused by thinness or inadequacy of integration fibers between the prefrontal cortex (our center of thought and choice) and the amygdala, the part of the brain that warns of danger and controls emotions. Meditation seems to enable these fibers to rebuild. In Dr. Siegel's work, patients suffering from manic-depression became completely symptom-free when practicing meditation and the other activities on a regular basis. Even with genetically created vulnerabilities, such as alcoholism, depression, schizophrenia, and illness, we can change those parts of the brain that are affected, thus moderating inherited weaknesses.

7. The practices that induce the brain to develop integration of its synapses and thickening of connecting fibers, especially between the prefrontal areas that support integration and the brain stem, which supports brain growth, are:

- meditation;
- aerobic exercise;
- Omega 3;
- originality, innovation, creativity, fresh ways of seeing things;
- paying close attention to everything coming in from the senses;
- enough sleep.

Expressive modalities - writing, dance and other expressive movement, visual art, music - create a state of healthy alertness, relaxation, and release. It feels like joy. It's the state of flow -- which is synonymous with the dynamic Self (vs. ego) delineated by ancient wisdom traditions and modern psychologists, including Jung and his followers.

8. Wholeness and integration manifests as vitality, fun, and light-heartedness.

In the mythic journey (the heart and soul of my story approach) the highest evolved archetype is the jester, who holds the whole truth of existence -- both its light and shadow -- within a non-harming joke and a good laugh.

-----

A list of Dr. Siegel's books, provided in a follow-up e-mail by Ruth M. Buczynski, PhD, President of The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine, include:

The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are;
The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being;
Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation;
The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology).

ENJOY!

How Story Can Help Stressed-Out Staff

Story has a role to play in every aspect of our lives.

Some years ago I presented a storytelling program for technical and support staff at a major hospital in Washington, DC. These are the people who operate the technology and shepherd patients through the acute care journey, from the first terrifying admissions interview, through pre-surgical tests and prep, to and from the OR to recovery -- and ultimately to discharge. Their impact on a patient's experience is huge. (You may have experienced the spike of fear aroused by a sullen admissions clerk or the trust that you were in good hands inspired by a gentle touch on your shoulder.) They bear the brunt of the stress in our dysfunctional care system, are on the receiving end of most complaints, and yet they are the forgotten employees.

"There's no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside yourself." -- Maya Angelou.

This was a special event held in a conference room usually reserved for hospital board meetings. The door was closed, with instructions not to enter during the two hours of this workshop. The atmosphere was determinedly non-clinical. With meditative music playing; platters of sandwiches, fruit, and cookies on a side table; and a complete absence of supervisors, there would be no mistaking this get-together for a departmental meeting.

I introduced the program with a scenario: They had probably left home in the morning with everything they would need during the day, I said: wallet, keys, cell phones, credit cards. Everything, that is, except what mattered most: themselves. Their hopes and worries about their kids; their plan for a dream vacation; the burden of caring for an elderly parent; and all the possibilities and potentials they had given up along the way to create a little security.

This time that we had together was dedicated to the untold stories they were carrying around all day as they tended to the care of others. Frankly, I wasn't sure how this invitation to greater intimacy in relationship would go over in an acute care hospital.

There were twenty-five participants, and as it turned out, a day-long workshop wouldn't have been too long for them. They were starved for attention, respect, listening. Everyone had a story and together they created a sorrowful documentary of a day in the life of a hospital worker.

One woman, whose job was to transport patients, described the loneliness and fear that she felt constantly in the face of so much suffering. "Sometimes I hug the patients, but it's just as much for myself as it is for them," she said.

As stories naturally do when people realize they are being heard, the stories moved from distress to hope to laughter and finally to transformational action. They shared with one another their dreams of taking night courses to finish college, getting a better job, going to Hawaii, seeing their grandchildren graduate high school. And they collaborated on an employee stress reduction plan to present to administrators.

1. They asked for a quiet room with plants, sofas, and soft music, where they could eat, read, catch a nap, and just relax. They got a small unused storage area.

2. They asked for a weekly support group for any staff who wanted to attend. They got a biweekly one.

3. They asked for more input in the staff weekly newsletter. They got article suggestion boxes in their departments.

But really, they got much more: a new sense of community and connection that could sustain them throughout the suffering they witnessed day in and day out. This project was only one clear drop in the toxic ocean of our healthcare system, but it changed how things were done and how people saw themselves in one small place.

And it began with the spark of collective creativity ignited by story.


If you would like to give your staff the gift of story this holiday season, please visit http://www.julietbruce.com/Story_at_Work.html .

Watering Holes: Where Story Began and Why It Heals

“I feel different,” said one of the women at the end of a recent story group. "I’m relaxed and refreshed, in a totally different state of mind than I was when I came in tonight.“ At another group, the same words, almost verbatim: "I came in exhausted from work and didn’t know how I was going to get through this evening. Now, I’m completely energized. This is so powerful.” We each agreed: amazing how refreshing this story circle has been for all of us, me included. The mood was up as we each made our way into the hot Manhattan night.

No matter where I have brought story circles, this same quality of relaxation, refreshment, and renewal -- transcendence is a good word -- has flowed. Whether it’s been in a midtown Manhattan office building, a prison day room, a homeless shelter, a hospital cancer unit, a clinic for teens with HIV/AIDS, a post-9/11 first responder treatment center -– environments filled with trauma, stress, fear, depression, and isolation within crowds -- people relax; their voices become stronger; strangers bond intimately; life force flows; and profound healing occurs.

Storytelling is the oldest and most healing form of human interaction. When we tell and listen to certain kinds of stories, we literally step out of our ordinary selves and into a larger, non-ordinary consciousness. It's here that the healing, breakthroughs, epiphanies, and the unexpected events we call "miracles" happen first before they manifest in our outer lives.

These stories open pathways to our primitive limbic brain -- beneath and surrounding our thinking brain -- which holds our ability to feel and to attach with others. It's sometimes called shamanic or right-brain consciousness or Source intelligence. Describing the sophistication of alleged primitive consciousness, the environmental philosopher David Abram, in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More Than Human World, writes that early humans lived directly in the natural world, engaging intimately with the larger community of beings upon which villages depended for nourishment and sustenance. "It is only as a result of her continual engagement with the ancient powers that dwell beyond human community that the traditional magician is able to alleviate many individual illnesses that arise within that community....His magic is precisely this heightened receptivity to the meaningful solicitations -- songs, cries, gestures -- of the larger, more-than-human field."

In the same way, storytelling teaches us how to collaborate and co-create with our experience rather than try to control it. Over and over, in my 16 years' experience, an image, character, or situation in a fairy tale or myth makes a connection or opens a blockage at a level of a listener's psyche that is inaccessible to their rational mind and ordinary language. Sometimes unimaginable transformations in mood, behavior, and life flow from this opening that happens between a story and a listener.

My observation is supported by science. Harvard researcher Gregg Jacobs writes in his book, Ancestral Mind: Reclaim the Power, that experiences of beauty –- in nature, art, music, and images in poetry and story -– actually trigger genetic memories of places of refuge and nourishment in the ancient world in which we evolved. These deep limbic memories induce calm and a feeling of well-being, when the world was full of information, fresh, unbounded, magical, and alive. Call it beginner's mind or child's mind. Jacobs calls this transcendent state Ancestral Mind.

BIRDS – the First Storytellers
An ancient dawn. The sky is streaked a soft pink announcing the arrival of the sun at the horizon. A lush landscape of trees, bushes, flowers surrounding a watering hole or small lake. Animals of every variety lap its waters.

From the branches, birds call out to their fellows in repetitive rhythmic and melodic patterns. Across miles and generations, birds call each other to places of refuge, where they can build their nests and continue their species.

Into a morning like this some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, a parched human being wandered, drawn by these bird calls. He bent down at the edge of the cool water, drank, and listened…

Over centuries of listening to these avian melodies, long before humans became verbal creatures, they learned how to communicate with each other by carving flutes from the bones of dead animals and imitating the songs of birds. Over thousands of years, as our ancestors gained the ability to form words, these melodies evolved into songs.

As humans strove to make meaning of existence, songs evolved into the oral narratives we know as stories. Gathered around fires under the stars in the vast night of early life, storytellers sang stories to explain the mysteries of birth, suffering, and death. These story-songs offered refuge and nourishment, light and hope, and guidance for survival.

So story began in song: songs of creation; songs of praise to appease the unseen powers that sent storms and droughts; songs to the sun so it would rise the next day; songs that taught and mourned; songs that delighted and entertained. Images, characters, and plot lines emerged out of the chaos of experience, as human beings imagined and created civilizations.

Modern story circles help us access this vast repository of human intelligence so intimately connected to the natural world.

Story as Medicine

“There is something about seeing, hearing, and smelling the ocean that has bypassed the ego, and straightened out many things that were in disarray within the psyche. Story has that same kind of influence. It flows where it is needed, and applies itself there -– like an antibiotic that finds the source of infection and concentrates there. The story helps make that part of the psyche clear and strong again.” -- Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

My approach to story is modeled on ancestral tradition. I developed it originally in a prison maximum security unit for mentally ill men to distinguish my groups from clinical therapy, moralizing spiritual fellowships, and teaching. I wanted to create an environment where the imagination could flow, where every member was equal, and where "power" meant only the power to tell about their life in their own voice.

The process is simple: I define a story space through meditative music and light a storytellers’ fire -– a candle serves. Once the group is settled into a circle, I tell an "old story" -- a fairy tale or myth -- to set a safe container and a thematic launchpad for brainstorming, writing, and sharing. Then I step back and let Ancestral Mind do its work. Even when I’m working privately with a client, I situate myself in this story place, and hold it as they step in with me to view their lives through a greater, older, and wiser lens.

Like water, story is timeless, flowing across cultures, centuries, and continents to serve its purpose of healing, transforming, refreshing, and raising human consciousness. Whether we gather around an ancient fire on the African plain or in a crowded Manhattan office within a maze of air shafts, steam pipes, and exhaust ducts, "Once upon a time..." opens the path to archetypal places where we can drink, rest, and refresh ourselves for the journey ahead.




Here’s a story exercise that you can do alone or with others.
1. What are the watering holes in your life -- natural environments, relationships, activities that nourish you? What are places that have served as sanctuaries in your life? What were their colors, features, shapes. What emotions did they elicit? Who nourishes and expands you? Who gives you energy and courage? Make a map of watering holes.

2. Jot down four or five words about one of them that stands out. What word has the most energy or mystery for you? Make that your first word and then follow the words for five minutes.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

3. Did you see any patterns in the places and people you choose for refuge and well-being? What do you need now for renewal?

References
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

Gregg D. Jacobs, Ancestral Mind: Reclaim the Power, New York: Viking, 2003.

http://www.soundstrue.com/articles/A_Life_Made_by_Hand_with_Clarissa_Pinkola_Estes/.


Copyright 2011. All rights reserved by Juliet Bruce, Ph.D. You may use material from this blog but please quote me when you use my words.

Creativity, Compassion, and the Resilient Brain

As someone who has witnessed the amazing power of storytelling and other expressive modalities to support healing in many hundreds of people coping with the impact of childhood abuse, adult trauma, grief, severe mental illness, and depression, I'm interested in neuroplasticity, which is the term for the brain's ability to repair and rebuild itself throughout life.

(The graphic comes from http://www.knutsford-scibar.co.uk.)

Recently I listened to a series of web conferences on this topic sponsored by the The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine. http://www.nicabm.com.

On Wednesday, April 6, 2011, Dr. Dan Siegel, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who's well known for writing a number of books on the developing brain and the mindful brain, spoke about how early relationships shape the development of the brain, and how later experience can change it. (His web site: http://drdansiegel.com/.) I'm going to share with you a summary of the notes I took during the call, with my later reflections in italics. Basically, Dr. Siegel's talk scientifically affirmed everything I've experienced in egalitarian, non-clinical, expressive arts groups.

Dr. Siegel noted that the right brain is the seat of compassion, sense of context, oneness, refreshment, and it can be accessed through creativity, exercise, and meditation. It holds the consciousness of the Ground, context, symbolic meaning, interior life, and the ability to rejuvenate and heal. The left brain -- dominant in our culture -- connects to exterior life, strategic thinking, and literal meaning. A balance of both halves of the brain is necessary for optimal functioning. In some of its aspects, healing can be understood as a journey of patient and caregivers to strengthen right brain functioning:

1. Empathy -- connecting to the inner life of another person -- has been shown to improve every physical system in the body: immune, cardiovascular, and organ systems. The more interest a doctor expresses in the inner life of a patient, i.e., how that patient experiences their illness rather than symptomology, the more likely a positive outcome. According to Dr. Siegel, THE KEY TO OPTIMAL HEALING IS THE CONNECTING INNER LIFE TO INNER LIFE [my emphasis]. This means that doctors, teachers, therapists, parents, clergy must be in touch with their own inner lives. He called it practicing medicine, parenting, marrying, etc. from the inside out.

Storytelling is the most ancient and powerful way of reciprocal sharing inner life with another. Any of the non-verbal expressive media serve the same purpose. But we're narrative creatures, seeking meaning in our experience. This is the realm of story.

2. Scientists now accept health as wholeness, integration -- a natural drive, rather than conforming to an external standard of "fitness" or "normal," as it had previously. Neural integration means the linking of fragmented parts through brain fibers that connect different neurological parts and functions. In people who suffered early neglect or abuse, these integrative fibers have been damaged and the brain is not functioning as a harmonious system. Consequently, the body's systems are not functioning harmoniously and trauma or neglect often shows up somatically.

Story making, in its very nature, creates wholeness and integration. It holds conflict in the form of characters and situations in a larger container, and allows these conflicts to play out and resolve themselves naturally as a new story emerges. As storyteller of our lives, we are also the integrating consciousness.

3. The brain regulates the movement of energy throughout the nervous system and healthy, harmonious outer relationships strengthen this function. Chaotic, draining, turbulent relationships significantly impact neurological functioning.

The healing community that forms in story groups, or any other healing relationship based on a right-brain modality (not therapy necessarily, unless it has these qualities of creativity and inner life to inner life), be it authentic movement, expressive dance, free form visual arts, music making and listening, yoga, reiki, qigong (my spiritual practice), mindfulness meditation, equine therapy, shamanic chant, etc. becomes the container that holds a person and gives their brain an integrative environment, time, and space to heal itself and the integrative fibers to regrow.

4. Humiliation, shame, bullying are assaults on the whole system. What happens in the brain is that a natural drive for wholeness and expression slams on the brakes, and the victim is left with a sense of helplessness, anger, toxic release of cortisol -- the stress hormone. It kills synaptic connections in the brain. This manifests physically as nausea, a sense of being punched in the gut, avoidance of eye contact, heaviness in the chest. Inwardly it manifests as a sense of a defective self.

Storytelling and witness gives each person a sense of safety, belonging, and dignity, so necessary to thriving.

5. We are hard-wired to sense the intention of another -- especially if they have destructive or harmful intentions toward us. The stress hormone cortisol keeps us in a state of vigilance when our right brain senses danger in a relationship. But we are out of a state of integration and flow. Long-term emotional danger has enormous physical consequences.

Working with intuition, which is strengthened by the receptivity involved in creative process, makes us even more aware and responsive to toxicity in other people and situations. In these story groups, which are built on the sensory elements of time, environment, character, situation, and storyteller -- we become very attentive to where we are, what we're doing, and the often unconscious motivations and inner lives of others. For me at this point, story -- experiencing my life as an unfolding story with myself as the witness and storyteller -- is spiritual practice.

6. Mental illness, including depression and bipolar disorder, are apparently caused by thinness or inadequacy of integration fibers between the prefrontal cortex (our center of thought and choice) and the amygdala, the part of the brain that warns of danger and controls emotions. Meditation seems to enable these fibers to rebuild. In Dr. Siegel's work, patients suffering from manic-depression became completely symptom-free when practicing meditation and the other activities on a regular basis. Even with genetically created vulnerabilities, such as alcoholism, depression, schizophrenia, and illness, we can change those parts of the brain that are affected, thus moderating inherited weaknesses.

7. The practices that induce the brain to develop integration of its synapses and thickening of connecting fibers, especially between the prefrontal areas that support integration and the brain stem, which supports brain growth, are:

- meditation;
- aerobic exercise;
- Omega 3;
- originality, innovation, creativity, fresh ways of seeing things;
- paying close attention to everything coming in from the senses;
- enough sleep.

Expressive modalities - writing, dance and other expressive movement, visual art, music - create a state of healthy alertness, relaxation, and release. It feels like joy. It's the state of flow -- which is synonymous with the dynamic Self (vs. ego) delineated by ancient wisdom traditions and modern psychologists, including Jung and his followers.

8. Wholeness and integration manifests as vitality, fun, and light-heartedness.

In the mythic journey (the heart and soul of my story approach) the highest evolved archetype is the jester, who holds the whole truth of existence -- both its light and shadow -- within a non-harming joke and a good laugh.

-----

A list of Dr. Siegel's books, provided in a follow-up e-mail by Ruth M. Buczynski, PhD, President of The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine, include:

The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are;
The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being;
Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation;
The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology).

ENJOY!

by Juliet Bruce, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

Releasing Light in Dark Times Through Storytelling

"I saw an angel in the stone and I carved until I set him free."

No one since Michelangelo has more aptly or succinctly told the story of creative process. In one sentence, the sculptor describes its stages: encounter with raw material, receptive attention to the point of love, trusting that inner presence through the not-knowing-for-sure time, illumination, patient and committed toil, and finally manifestation in the concrete world.

So too with life. Whether we are trying to nourish the inherent strengths of a troubled young person, find deeper love in a conflicted relationship, rebuild our life after loss, create common ground between adversaries, or express ourselves in a fresh way, there is no system, structure, or formula more powerful than creative process.

In his book Narrative Medicine: The Use of History and Story in the Healing Process, Dr. Lewis Mehl-Medrona shares a Pasqua Yaqui native American tale from the southwest about an old man who owned light, but kept it hidden in a box within a box deeply buried inside his house. He was afraid that if it was released, he would discover that his daughter, who lived with him, was ugly. Writes Mehl-Madrona, "You've probably seen the same thing I have, where people are so afraid of what could happen that they hide their gifts and capabilities from themselves and each other." (p. 59)

Through a messy series of mishaps instigated by the trickster Raven, the light is eventually freed from the box, only to be dropped by Raven in his escape, shattering into millions of tiny fragments. The pieces of light hit the ground and bounce back into the sky, where they appear as the moon and stars. Raven gathers together the remaining fragments, shapes them into a ball, and carries the throbbing orb high into the sky. It shines every day as the sun, making life possible on earth.

Once the world becomes visible, the old man sees that his daughter is beautiful. There had been no reason to hide the light in the first place.

Are we not in many ways like that old man? So afraid of finding out we're not good enough that we hide who we are in boxes within boxes? Yet what the world needs more than anything in these traumatic times is for us to be exactly who we are: imperfect, vulnerable, but fully alive and radiating our life force -- the luminous heart at the center of all living things.

One way to do that is to carve away the masks and walls we erect to protect our inner selves from pain, which we learn to do very early in chldhood. To shape the fragments of images, echoes, and moments into our story -- the deep soul story that carries our passion and our purpose for being here. To release Soul into our yearning world.

Working in the metaphors of story, we relearn what we have always intuitively known: that the processes of growth, healing, and transformation mean asking not "How can I fix or change this problem?" but rather "What wants to emerge right here and now from these circumstances and from this person that I am?"

Like rocks obstructing the flow of water, obstacles in our own lives slow us down, ask us to pay close attention, look for the meaning of experience in our interior world, and ask ourselves, "How can I set the angel free?"


Find the Story of Now

Thinking now as artist, storyteller, and sculptor, ask yourself in the third person:

1. What time is it in your life, in the life of your family, your community, the world? Find a metaphor to describe your intuitive sense of time.

2. What's the external environment? And what's the mood? Landscapes and built environments mirror something important about the people who live and work there. The overall atmosphere reflects the deeper emotional context.

3. Who's there? What do they yearn for more than anything? What do they resist with all their might? What private stories do they carry that may be colliding when they interact?

4. What's a healing story plot line you can carve out of these fragments? Remember, healing story has a basic structure of crisis, struggle, unexpected and marvelous help, and transformation.

5. Now write this story line fast -- in 10 or 15 minutes. Get it down on paper. Make it real. The writer is the voice of your internal Storyteller, the voice that reframes, changes, shapes, sculpts, listens, and tells the story. This is the voice that externalizes inner conflicts, moves you out of isolation into community, and releases your light and warmth, which are so desperately needed in these times.

6. Now -- very important -- share your story with trusted others.

Start right here, right now, to open a channel for life force to flow into the world. Set the angel free.


---------

Maya Angelou: "There's no greater agony than carrying around an untold story inside yourself."

I maintain a private practice in New York City and a long distance one by phone with clients in other cities. The journaling, storymaking, and visual arts exercises I offer along with my creative approach are extremely effective in helping you heal from:

~ unhealthy stress;
~ anxiety and depression;
~ unhappiness in a relationship;
~ separation and divorce;
~ deeply rooted financial issues (beyond money itself);
~ impact of childhood trauma;
~ loss and grief;
~ general dissatisfaction with life;
~ unfulfilled creative potential; and
~ career and life transitions.

Working in right-brain expressive modalities helps you make quantum yet grounded leaps forward to the life you want more than anything to be yours. You go deep and you go fast -- and given the creative and incremental structures of poetry and story -- within a safe emotional container.

When you fully tell the story hidden in whatever is blocking you, the block dissolves. Creative, passionate life energy flows freely. "This feels light," said one client, "even though we're dealing with some dark stuff. Big and light. I don't want this to end."


by Juliet Bruce. All rights reserved.

If you would like to schedule a free half hour phone consultation or receive a free storymaking tool, please write me at julietbrucephd@gmail.com.